A
Texas man says he and his partner were together for 34 years but his
partner’s sister has now forced them apart, taken their home, and his
partner’s finances — and done it legally because they weren’t married.
For the last six years his partner, Jim, who is older, suffered from
Alzheimer’s. Jim’s estranged sister, Lon Watts writes on Facebook,
was able to take their home and Jim’s finances through the courts by
filing for guardianship — despite Lon having power of attorney.

“She put him in a Nursing Home and had criminal trespass orders against me to keep me away from him,” Lon Watts writes:

I’LL
NEVER BE ABLE TO SEE HIM AGAIN! She got his bank account from Social
Security Disability and sold his house out from under me. I had 2 weeks
to vacate our home of 12 years.

If we were EQUAL in the eyes
of the law we would be together till the end. But as it stands in Texas,
a money hungry greedy relative was able to steal our life and toss me
out as trash to pad her pocketbook. I pray God has mercy on her soul for
her evil deeds. I am content knowing the world is coming around to
acknowledge that ALL HUMANS ARE CREATED EQUAL and SHOULD HAVE EQUAL
RIGHTS.

Lon’s story has been shared almost 3000 times on Facebook and has more than 3000 likes. Sadly, Lon and Jim’s story, and otherslikeit, are the exact reason why marriage must be extended to all same-sex couples across the entire nation.

Anyone
who claims needs and rights of same-sex couples can be protected
through some legal forms is not only mistaken, but wholly wrong and
spreading false information.

A shocking number of states allow custody rights to men who impregnate their victims. One state is saying "enough"

Imagine that after one of the most harrowing experiences a person
could endure, a woman not only found herself pregnant but also made the
bold, difficult choice to raise the child. Imagine next that her
decision would then give her rapist an opportunity to remain firmly in
her life, in one of the most intimate of relationships.

Imagine he
wanted – and legally had the right to be – that child’s father. It’s a
very real scenario, all across America. But in one state, that may soon
be changing.

As a riveting CNN story last summer, at the height of “legitimate rape” fever,
illuminated, a stunning majority of states – 31 of them – offer some
form of visitation and custody rights for men who impregnate their rape
victims. And it’s not just the threat of having to co-parent with one’s
assailant that’s a nightmare for many victims — it’s the ugly
opportunism it inspires. As attorney Shauna Prewitt, whose daughter was
the product of a sexual assault, wrote back then, “When no law prohibits
a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to
bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the
rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child.” A baby can become a
bargaining chip.

But a new bill before Colorado lawmakers would
block rapists from exerting parental rights. Republican state Rep. Lois
Landgraf, the House sponsor of the bill, is seeking to end a system
whereby victims must still “face some relationship with the rapist.”

A
2010 Georgetown report on “Giving Birth to a Rapist’s Child” put the
estimate of the percentage of women who carry and keep the children
conceived via rape at between 32.3 percent and as high as 64
percent. And though the bill, which has already passed unanimously out
of the state Senate, would not change the game for women who are still
struggling through the Colorado legal system with their children; it
would apply to convictions after July 1 of this year.

Protection for victims would not be automatic, either. Victims would instead be able to “file a petition in juvenile court to prevent future contact with the parent who committed the sexual assault.”
But it represents a move toward far greater protection all around – a
firm stance that convicted rapists are “not relieved of any obligation
to pay child support unless waived by the victim,” while also granting
victims the right to “a no-contact protection” if they wish. And because
justice doesn’t always take place in a courtroom, the bill also
proposes a task force to investigate parental rights when there have
been allegations of sexual assault without a conviction.

Danish scientists are expecting results that will show that “finding a
mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible”.

They are conducting clinical trials to test a “novel strategy” in
which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently
by the immune system.

The move would represent a dramatic step forward in the attempt to find a cure for the virus, which causes Aids.

This may or may not be finally happening. But let’s say this is true.
If not now, then in the near future. What will the reaction be? Elation
from the LGBT community, celebration on the left and a sigh of relief
from the health insurance industry (HIV treatment is expensive). But
what about the right-wing? Well, if history tells us anything. the GOP
will deeply opposed to a cure. Especially a cheap one.Why? You won’t like the answer.Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives LOVE
HIV. They absolutely love it. They love it because it disproportionately
affect homosexuals and IV drug users and anything that hurts “sinners”
is perfectly fine with them. Added bonus? It also hits “fornicators” and
mostly leaves married monogamous couples alone.I guarantee you, and I’ll place a money bet on it, that even if this
one turns out to be a bust,when a real cure for HIV is announced, the
religious right will throw a hissy fit and the GOP will kowtow to them.
My proof of this deeply cynical and anti-human stance? HPV.In 2006, an extremely effective vaccine for HPV (human papilloma virus)
was created and put into widespread distribution. HPV is a very common
sexually transmitted virus (upwards of 80% of American women reportedly
have it) and while for most it is harmless, in some it causes cervical
cancer.What happened when politicians put the vaccine into widespread use?
The religious right freaked out because eliminating an STD “promotes”
promiscuity. I’m dead serious.Continue reading at: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/04/29/if-you-think-the-religious-right-wants-a-cure-for-aids-youd-be-dead-wrong/

Hunger strikes are a desperate action taken by people with no other means to call attention to their plight.I used to be ignorant of American History. I believed we were a good nation.Over
the years I have learned we are a blood thirsty genocidal nation, one
that wages imperialistic wars and enslaves people and nations for the
benefit of the rich who control corporations.Over
the last ten years I have come to realize we are a nation that thinks
nothing of torturing prisoners of war. We deny them all rights, water
board them, destroy their humanity and more.We have a history of doing this.We did it to the Suffragists during the 1910s.Now we do it to the prisoners in Guantanamo.

Saudi Arabia is leading calls for climate change to be omitted from the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

At an SDG meeting in New York last week attended by over 70 nations
the Saudis, together with fellow oil producers Venezuela and the UAE
called for discussions of climate change to be separated from those on
energy.

The three nations feature in the top seven of proven oil reserves
worldwide, and have opposed targets to encourage clean energy over
fossil fuels, despite evidence that climate change will exacerbate
global hunger and poverty.

“Saudi Arabia don’t want climate change in the same session yet alone
the same day as energy. They don’t really want it in there at all,” Stakeholder Forum’s Farooq Ullah, who attended the meeting, told RTCC.

“They oppose climate and energy being associated with one another and
say energy [targets] should only deal with energy access, which clearly
indicates they don’t want to set goals around the sustainability of the
source of energy,” he added.

The SDGs were established at the Rio+20 summit and are set to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which end in 2015.

Their main objective is poverty alleviation but the focus on
sustainability could add momentum to climate-friendly development at a
time when countries are starting negotiations over a legally binding
emissions deal also set to be agreed in 2015.

“Climate change is going to be a struggle in the SDGs in general because of the UNFCCC, the UN’s climate change body,” said Ullah.

Temperature spikes causing drastic shifts in ecosystem

Ocean surface temperatures off the Northeast U.S. coast last year were the highest in 150 years, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Comparing measurements taken since 1854, the scientists from NOAA’s
Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) said that sea surface
temperatures between Cape Hatteras and the Canadian border, the
Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem, reached a record breaking
average high of 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit last year.

The shifting temperatures are having a drastic impact on the
under-water ecosystems of the region, the NEFSC reports, with over half
of 36 fish stocks in the northwest Atlantic Ocean shifting northward in
the past 40 years.

The temperature increase in 2012 alone was the highest jump in
temperature ever recorded, according to the NEFSC, which analyzed data
from satellite remote-sensing data and long-term ship-board
measurements.

Readings at the US government's Earth Systems Research laboratory in Hawaii,
are not expected to reach their 2013 peak until mid May, but were
recorded at a daily average of 399.72ppm on 25 April. The weekly average
stood at 398.5 on Monday.

"Each
year, the concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa rises and falls in a
sawtooth fashion, with the next year higher than the year before. The
peak of the sawtooth typically comes in May. If CO2 levels don't top
400ppm in May 2013, they almost certainly will next year," Keeling said.

CO2
atmospheric levels have been steadily rising for 200 years, registering
around 280ppm at the start of the industrial revolution and 316ppm in
1958 when the Mauna Loa observatory started measurements. The increase
in the global burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of the
increase.

Here’s
a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform
better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor
families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and
higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they
also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities
and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher
rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it
deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic,
this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in
the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the
question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is
news is that in the United States over the last few decades these
differences in educational success between high- and lower-income
students have grown substantially.

One
way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on
standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did
this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted
between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is
about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this
trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of
$165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes
are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution
nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in
families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families
with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point
SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two
such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points.
This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between
white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of
children’s success in school than race.

The latest, hottest thing in higher education is the MOOC: Massive Open Online Course.
Students—tens of thousands, supposedly—can now sit in their PJs in
their bedrooms and take an online course, free and typically for no
credit. If they finish, they get a certificate. The really hot MOOCs are
taught by renowned experts whose lectures can now be seen by anyone
with Internet access. As Stanford, Harvard, MIT and others have
introduced MOOCs, there’s been something of a panic among universities
to get in on the ground floor or else be left in the dust as some old,
out-of-touch, brick-and-mortar has-been.

The hype: MOOCs will
revolutionize higher education. “The single biggest change in education
since the printing press” is how Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist
who heads the MIT-Harvard consortium offering MOOCs, has described them. “There’s a tsunami coming,” says Stanford President John Hennessy. Thomas Friedman has hailed MOOCs as driving down the cost of college and possibly even replacing traditional higher education.

Time
for a skeptical breather. Would it be educational to sit
in—digitally—on a free course taught by a world-famous expert in, say,
art history, astronomy or Internet law? You bet. But no one knows what
the funding model for MOOCs is going to be. If they’re free, how are
they supported over time? Lurking in the background, given the need for a
workable financial structure, is the further commercialization of
higher education into for-profit centers.

The excitement about MOOCs coincides with widespread defunding of public higher education. State after state has slashed its education budget,
forcing tuition prices up and constricting the ability of many
institutions to hire or retain faculty. Federal funding cuts to agencies
like the National Science Foundation are hampering the country’s
preeminence in research. And conservatives who hate science and the
liberal arts have stereotyped college professors as pampered divas who
work six hours a week, when most faculty I know work somewhere between
60-70 hours a week, sometimes much more.

Online courses represent
yet another way that corporate-minded administrators can squeeze more
work out of faculty for less pay. Teaching an online course is
considerably more labor-intensive than teaching in the classroom: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports
that professors typically spend over 100 hours preparing MOOCs, and
then there are the 8-10 hours every week presiding over chats,
responding to emails and updating material. Right now, faculty are not
being compensated for this extra work.

Need a creative way to fight fears of our planetary demise? A new book by Billy Talen prophetically titled, The End of the World(OR
Books), may be just the trick. Talen, also known as Reverend Billy, and
his Church of Stop Shopping, exposes the socio-political structure of
consumerism and the commoditization of the earth with songs, impassioned
preaching and theater events. Talen has been arrested 70 times along
with members of the Church for their acts of civil disobedience in banks
and other places of corporate mediation.

Their decade-long
collaboration, under the direction of Savitri D, has brought them to
communities throughout the U.S. and internationally where they have
built a performance institution of communities of action with songs and
uplifting protest spectacle on the streets and in concert halls. Talen
and the Church’s inspiring and engaging performances ask us to take
action on behalf of our home on our rapidly dying planet.

The End of the World is being promoted with the launch of the international Revolt of the Golden Toad tour, which began in San Francisco on April 22. The End of the World
is a poetic cry of sermons to wake people up about the climate crisis,
destruction of biodiversity, and catastrophic consumption orchestrated
by global capitalism.

Talen spoke with AlterNet about his new book and what motivates his creative actions.

Sabrina Artel: How did this book project come about?

Billy Talen: Because of my growing feeling that human
beings are losing. We’re losing ground to the corporations and the big
banks, and the earth movement is losing. The big bank system needs to
multiply their products and keep us in a state of consumption.
Consumerism needs to be defeated.

As I started watching the sack of diapers next to [my
daughter] Lena when she was born in the hospital at St. Vincent’s they
were covered by Mickey Mouse faces. Here in NY we have high pressure
tests confronting first-graders. The Church of Stop Shopping and I have
been active in the movement to stop paying back student debt because
it’s reached a trillion dollars so that young people can’t defend the
earth; young people can’t be politicized because they are saddled with
debt along with their marching orders to become consumers. Climate
change kills people every day. It’s dangerous. Certainly it certainly
kills people who don’t have the resources to defend themselves. It’s a
conscious class war.

ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 28 2013 (IPS) -
Food safety advocates are outraged over revelations that U.S. Congress
and President Barack Obama approved an act that includes a provision
purporting to strip federal courts of the ability to prevent the spread
of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The provision in the Consolidated and
Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 requires the U.S.
Department of Agriculture to issue temporary permits allowing the
continued planting of GMOs by farmers, even when a court rules that the
agency erred in its environmental impact review of the GMOs.

The provision, which activists call the Monsanto Protection Act, is
one for which the multinational corporation Monsanto has been lobbying
Congress for at least a year. The legislation passed the U.S. House of
Representatives on Mar. 6, 2013 and the Senate on Mar. 21, with Obama
signing the legislation five days later on Mar. 26.

Revelations of the provision, which was buried in the 587-page spending bill (HR 933,
under Division A, Title VI, Section 735), have increased public
awareness and interest in the issue of GMOs in the United States.

The provision states that if “a determination of non-regulated
status…is or has been invalidated or vacated, the Secretary of
Agriculture shall, notwithstanding any other provision of law, upon
request by a farmer, grower, farm operator, or producer, immediately
grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation in part”.

Industry control

U.S. Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana and one of the only
family farmers in Congress, spoke out against the provision on the floor
on the Senate.

“The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department
that even if a court tells you that you’ve failed to follow the right
process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court’s
ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway,” Tester said.

“Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of
powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across
this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law,” Tester said,
describing the issue as “once again, agribusiness multinational
corporations putting farmers as serfs”.

'This is not abstract theorizing. Bees are dying out. Now.'

Ahead of an expected EU vote
on Monday that will determine a possible ban on a class of pesticides
that scientists say are killing off the continents' bees and other
pollinators, a coalition of beekeepers, conservationists, gardeners, and
environmental activists marched on Parliament in London on Friday as a
way to urge the UK to join other European nations in supporting the ban.

Yellow and black dominated the scene as many in attendance dressed as
bees, wore their apiary suits and carried signs that read "Like Food?
Love Bees" and "No to Neonic," referring to pesticide class called
neonicotinoids that a number of recent studies have tied directly to the
decline of bee populations.

The organizers of the so-called "March of the Beekeepers"
included Avaaz, Friends of the Earth, Buglife, Environmental Justice
Foundation, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network UK, Soil Association
and the group 38 Degrees.

"Ministers can't ignore the growing scientific evidence linking
neonicotinoid insecticides to bee decline," said Friends of the Earth's
campaigns director Andrew Pendleton. "Their claims to be concerned about
bee health will ring hollow if they fail to back European moves to
restrict the use of these chemicals."

He continued: "If we lose our bees and other vital pollinators it'll
have a devastating impact on our food, gardens and environment. We
urgently need tougher pesticide restrictions and a British Bee Action
Plan to tackle all the threats they face."
Protesters came together to demand Environment Minister Owen Patterson
back moves to ban the worst bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides.
European countries will vote on the issue on Monday.

Underlining the urgency of the threat on Friday, Greenpeace's Graham
Patterson issued a stark warning: "This is not abstract theorizing. Bees
are dying out. Now."

I was watching TV the other day. Commercial break. Cut to a lush green
lawn. A single yellow dandelion springs up through the emerald
expanse. The heroic protagonist appears left. He spies the flower,
runs, dives, somersaults onto the lawn and pops up sturdily on one knee.
Brandishing a bottle of weed killer, he fires. The patented nozzle
rains hell on the defenseless sunbather. The flower withers. And dies.
The lawn-owner is triumphant. Right?

Though considered a weed by Round Up and many home/lawn owners in the
United States, the dandelion is actually an incredibly nutritious
food. It’s a great source of calcium, potassium, iron and manganese.
It’s replete with vitamins A, C, E, K, Niacin and Riboflavin. Chock
full of beta-carotene. The lecithin in its golden top detoxifies the
liver. The roots can be roasted to make a coffee substitute, or used
in soups. The leaves (tastiest after they first emerge for the season
or after the first frost) can be eaten, as can its sweet yellow
blossoms. People use them in salads raw, boil them, fry them with
bacon, marinate them in vinegar, and sauté them with fresh garlic. Did
you ever notice that if you break the stem of a dandelion that a milky
white liquid comes out? Well, you can use that liquid to ease the pain
of bee stings and sores. Remember the advice of the great ancient Greek
physician, Hippocrates, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy
food”. These vitamins and minerals boost the immune system, fight
anemia, and help prevent the development of type II diabetes. Remember
the brain is a part of our body as well. Healthy bodies mean healthy
brains. Proper nutrition prevents depression and anxiety and improves
concentration. Scientists even believe that lecithin may help combat
Alzheimer’s.

Other cultures consume dandelions regularly. My friend Ricardo has
spent many summers living in Greece. I asked him how similar the food in
Greek town was to food “normal” people eat in Greece. “Very similar”
he told me “with one crucial difference. The Greek grandmothers gather
fresh greens (dandelions especially) every day. Then they add these
greens to tomato and cucumber salads, to meals of roasted lamb, and
spinach pie.” Even in Pensacola, Florida, my friend Kate’s yaya would
often demand that the car be pulled over so she could pick fresh
dandelion greens off the side of the road.

The dandelion doesn’t simply nourish humans; it nourishes other
plants as well. Year after year this perennial often reappears in spite
of all the mowings, weedings, and poisonings it endures. This is
because the dandelion has a “taproot”, a long twisted root that can grow
three feet deep within the earth. The taproot brings minerals and
nutrients not available at the soil’s surface to neighboring plants with
shorter roots. The taproot connects us to less contaminated parts of
Mother Earth. It connects us to our foundations.

In the Round Up commercial, the protagonist is only truly successful
in poisoning his home, his body and his mind while he prostrates himself
before his corporate overlords.

Williams
proclaimed that "Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year's San
Francisco Pride celebration" and termed his selection "a mistake". She
blamed it all on a "staff person" who prematurely made the announcement
based on a preliminary vote, and she assures us all that the culprit
"has been disciplined": disciplined. She then accuses Manning of "actions which placed in harms way [sic] the lives of our men and women in uniform": a substance-free falsehood originally spread by top US military officials which has since been decisively and extensivelydebunked, even by some government officials
(indeed, it's the US government itself, not Manning, that is guilty of
"actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in
uniform"). And then, in my favorite part of her statement, Williams
decreed to all organization members that "even the hint of support" for
Manning's action - even the hint - "will not be tolerated by the
leadership of San Francisco Pride". Will not be tolerated.

I
originally had no intention of writing about this episode, but the more
I discovered about it, the more revealing it became. So let's just
consider a few of the points raised by all of this.

I
used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in
the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when
my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common
practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began
annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no
particular risk factors for the disease.

So
when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the
film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn’t worried.
After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It
turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that
time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked
precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was
treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to
survive.

By
coincidence, just a week after my diagnosis, a panel convened by the
National Institutes of Health made headlines when it declined to
recommend universal screening for women in their 40s; evidence simply
didn’t show it significantly decreased breast-cancer deaths in that age
group. What’s more, because of their denser breast tissue, younger women
were subject to disproportionate false positives — leading to
unnecessary biopsies and worry — as well as false negatives, in which
cancer was missed entirely.

Those
conclusions hit me like a sucker punch. “I am the person whose life is
officially not worth saving,” I wrote angrily. When the American Cancer
Society as well as the newer Susan G. Komen foundation rejected the
panel’s findings, saying mammography was still the best tool to decrease
breast-cancer mortality, friends across the country called to
congratulate me as if I’d scored a personal victory. I considered myself
a loud-and-proud example of the benefits of early detection.

Sixteen
years later, my thinking has changed. As study after study revealed the
limits of screening — and the dangers of overtreatment — a thought
niggled at my consciousness. How much had my mammogram really mattered?
Would the outcome have been the same had I bumped into the cancer on my
own years later? It’s hard to argue with a good result. After all, I am
alive and grateful to be here. But I’ve watched friends whose breast
cancers were detected “early” die anyway. I’ve sweated out what
blessedly turned out to be false alarms with many others.

Recently,
a survey of three decades of screening published in November in The New
England Journal of Medicine found that mammography’s impact is
decidedly mixed: it does reduce, by a small percentage, the number of
women who are told they have late-stage cancer, but it is far more
likely to result in overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, including
surgery, weeks of radiation and potentially toxic drugs. And yet,
mammography remains an unquestioned pillar of the pink-ribbon awareness
movement.

The
Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year
reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big
banks can't fix

By Matt TaibbiApril 25, 2013Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of
the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you
an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but
your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this
out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest
banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three –
and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t")
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this
scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks –
including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal
Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global
interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive
manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were
caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year,
to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial
acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix
suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and
price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall
Street culture.

Friday night on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow
discussed the elaborate money-making schemes dreamed up by the
anti-government conspiracy theorists currently making a living off of
conservative Americans’ fears about the Obama administration.

“If you like Info Wars which is a show hosted by Alex Jones,” Maddow
said, “If you like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones who says we faked the moon
landing and that 9/11 was an elaborate hoax and that it was secretly the
White House that bombed the Boston Marathon, Michelle Obama was in on
it and there was no massacre at Sandy Hook, they were hoaxes, if you are
one of those folks, a conspiracy theorist who believes in the Glenn
Beck-Alex Jones view of the world, well, that doesn’t mean you don’t
need love.”Hence the prank Twitter hash tag that appeared late this week, #InfoWarsPickupLines, which featured romantic opening salvos
for conspiracy-minded singles on the make like “How about we get
illuminaughty and you show me your nude world order?” and “I’d like to
shoot all over your grassy knoll, if you know what I mean….” or “What’s
your sign? Mine is ‘Trespassers shot on sight.’”

But it doesn’t stop with just dating services. Men like Alex Jones
and Glenn Beck, said Maddow, are monetizing their fame in any way they
can. If you’re already in a relationship and don’t need Info Wars
dating, you can still buy some Glenn Beck pants or some Rush Limbaugh iced tea.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who Maddow “has always counted on the
conspiracy theorists to be part of his base,” has now left Congress and
decided to get back in bed with the right wing fringe. Friday, he appeared on Alex Jones’ radio show.

A unanimous Los Angeles City Council has demanded the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission conduct extended investigations before any restart
at the San Onofre atomic power plant.

)The
move reflects a deep-rooted public opposition to resumed operations at
reactors perched in a tsunami zone near earthquake faults that threaten
all of southern California.

Meanwhile, yet another top-level atomic insider has told ABC News that San Onofre Units 2 and 3 are not safe to operate.

On April 23, LA's eleven City Council members approved a resolution
directing the NRC to "make no decision about restarting either San
Onofre unit" until it conducts a "prudent, transparent and
precautionary" investigation. The city wants "ample opportunity" for
public comment and confirmation that "mandated repairs, replacements, or
other actions" have been completed to guarantee the public safety.

California's largest city thus joins Del Mar, Encinitas, Irvine,
Laguna Beach, Mission Viejo, San Clemente, Santa Monica, Solana Beach,
Vista, Berkeley, Fairfax and the San Diego Unified School District board
in asking the NRC to take all steps necessary to guarantee the public
safety. Some resolutions include the demand that the NRC make utility
officials testify under oath in public before San Onofre might be
allowed to go back on line.

The sentiment has been echoed by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
who chairs the Senate committee that oversees the NRC. Boxer has been
joined by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) in questioning whether
Southern California Edison knew steam generators being installed at San
Onofre were faulty.

The new Mitsubishi generators cost some $770,000,000. But critical
tubes began banging together and sprang leaks after less than a year of
operations. As many as 17% of the plant's 19,400 tubes may have been
involved.

The reactors were shut in January, 2012. Edison has since billed
ratepayers roughly a billion dollars for them, even though they've
generated no electricity for more than a year. The utility says it needs
the reactors' power for the coming southern California summer, even
though the region operated just fine last summer without them.

Arch
Coal, the second largest coal producer in the U.S., sued the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2010 when the agency vetoed a
mining permit that had been approved in 2006. The EPA said that new
studies published since the permit had been issued showed potential harm
to the area’s water quality.

“The damage from this project would be irreversible,”
said Shawn Garvin, the Mid-Atlantic regional administrator for the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which has issued an order to stop
the project. “EPA has a duty under the law to protect water quality and
safeguard the people who rely on these waters for drinking, fishing and
swimming.”

Mountaintop Coal Removal

What Arch Coal
was proposing is a relatively new technology called mountaintop coal
removal which has often been described as “strip mining on steroids.”
Forests are razed and burned. Age-old rocks are blasted through. Giant,
20-story tall shovels and bulldozers tear into the remaining mountain,
filling one 240-ton dump truck at a time. Once exposed, the embedded
coal seams are carted off for processing.

The remaining rubble is
dumped into surrounding valleys, submerging streams and rivers. Toxic
chemicals used in the mining process, as well as naturally occurring
minerals that are dangerous for wildlife and human consumption, leach
out from the debris into the waterways. So far, at least 2,200 square
miles (5,632 square kilometers) of the Appalachian mountain ranges have
been obliterated, and 1,200 miles (1,920 kilometers) of streams have
been buried, according to the EPA.Continue reading at: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15835

The niece of retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro has been denied a visa by the US State Department to travel to Philadelphia to accept an award for her work on behalf of gay rights.

Mariela Castro, director of Cuba's National Center for Sex Education,
is already in the US attending meetings in New York. But Cuban diplomats
are prevented from traveling more than 25 miles from the United Nations
without permission.

The Equality Forum, the group which was to give Castro the award on 4 May, called the visa denial 'shocking.'

“Over the past 11 years, Equality Forum has invited leaders of the
featured nation to attend. For those who needed a visa, all past visas
have been approved,' Executive Director Malcolm Lazin said in a
statement.
He added: 'It is shocking that our State Department would deny Ms.
Castro travel to a civil rights summit – especially one held in the
birthplace of our democracy that enshrines freedoms of speech and
assembly.'

Lazin praised Castro for running the leading Cuban LGBT organization
that offers support and services to LGBT youth and seniors, provides HIV
and STD education and prevention, and combats homophobia.

'These are shared values that deserve the right to be heard regardless of political systems,' he said.

What have you all done to yourselves? I've loved you for decades, but your plastic features are freaking me out

Hey, lady. You, lady. Beloved celebrity of my generation, icon with a
career spanning decades. I saw a story about you today and I was
excited, because I’ve always been your fan. Then I looked at it. And I
just want to know one thing. Girl, what the eff have you done to your face?

I’ve
tried to ignore it. I’ve tried not to say anything. Not just to you,
today, but to lots of female celebrities, for years. I want to believe
that if you were to go out and get a tattoo that said “I LOVE CHEESE”
across your forehead, I would support your right to do whatever makes
you happy. And as someone who keeps a stock of hair color in her closet
in case there’s ever a Feriapocalypse, and who doesn’t own an item of
makeup or moisturizer that doesn’t boldly feature the word “youth” on
the packaging, I’m not one to espouse growing older gracefully. I’d
never sell anybody on the nobility of looking like you just stepped out
of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

But
I’m really beginning to wonder if you’ve considered whether you’re
getting your money’s worth here. I imagine you’re pretty well off. Your
residuals income alone must be generous, and you still work steadily —
although you haven’t actually acted in a bit. So why do you look like a
crazy person? I take that back. Like a crazy doll. One side of
your face is visibly higher than the other. Your skin looks like it
hasn’t seen blood flow in a few years. Your long, long eyelashes flutter
all the way up to your eyebrows, which are located directly below your
hairline. I’ll say this, though, you are smooth as hell. If you were
going for Pennywise, but with a giant pair of knockers, mission
accomplished.

I want you to know that whatever you think of your
fans, I don’t expect you to look like you did 25 years ago — or even a
decade ago. And I’m genuinely sorry that you have to live in a crappy,
supermarket tabloid-saturated, gossipy website-overrun world in which
Now and Then photos of stars who’ve had the temerity to not remain
forever 18 are excoriated for it. I hate that the whole, “Look at her
today! Remember when she was cute?” thing exists. It sucks out loud. And
I cannot fathom what it is like to try to work in an industry that
churns out lithe teenagers like a Lucy Ricardo chocolate factory.

But
what I’d like somebody to tell you – and your plentiful frozen-faced
costars of both sexes – is that the clearly tremendous amount of time
and money and no doubt physical pain you have expended has not made you
look younger. It has not made you look better. It has made you look hard
and expressionless and, if I didn’t know better, as if you’d somehow
managed to become a CGI replica of your former self. And I’ve really got
to wonder if, living in your echo chamber of show business, you’ve
sacrificed the original goal of looking good for this generic, truly
weird end result of your extreme procedures.

President accuses US lawmakers of trying to 'turn back the clock to the 1950s' in attempt to limit abortion rights for women

President Obama has accused US lawmakers of wanting to "turn back the clock to the 1950s" as he launched a spirited defence of abortion services currently under attack in several states and Congress.

Speaking at a national conference held by clinic operator Planned Parenthood,
he described recent legislation in 42 states banning or severely
limiting the right to choose a termination as an "assault on women's
rights".

In unusually blunt language, Obama also said politicians
were trying to turn Planned Parenthood "into a punching bag" by
attempting to withdraw its federal funding.

"After decades of
progress, there's still those who want to turn back the clock to
policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century," he said. "And
they've been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll
back basic rights when it comes to women's health."

The White
House has previously tried to avoid being dragged in to the bitter
debate on abortion rights, particularly at the state level, but the
growing legislative backlash has sparked a renewed effort to shore up
support among Democrats.

"Forty years after the supreme court
affirmed a woman's constitutional right to privacy, including the right
to choose, we shouldn't have to remind people that when it comes to a
woman's health, no politician should get to decide what's best for you,"
added Obama.

The president took the stage to a standing ovation
from a crowd of about 1,000 mainly women attendees and was introduced by
Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who remarked that he was
the first sitting president to ever address a Planned Parenthood group.

"Because of President Obama, being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition in America," she added.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson